caricature of medieval Christianity that he feels compelled to present. Whereas Lucretius, Poggio, and their modern intellectual successors were marked by a restless curiosity and an adventurous desire to explore the physical universe, Catholics, Greenblatt maintains, were dogmatic, repressive, exclusively other-worldly. As evidence for this claim, he cites the medieval conviction, cultivated especially in the monasteries, that "curiositas" is a sin. Well, it might have helped if he had searched out what medieval Christians meant by that term. He would have discovered that "curiositas" names, not intellectual curiosity, but what we might characterize as gossip or minding other people's business, seeking to know that which you have no business knowing. In point of fact, the virtue that answers the vice of "curiositas" is "studiositas" (studiousness), the serious pursuit of knowledge.from Catholic News Agency: A review of Stephen Greenblatt's 'The Swerve'
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